So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

paused—“purpose. I’m thirty years old. I had a great career. If I don’t have a plan, if I don’t start making steps to reclaim my identity and remind myself of who I am on a daily basis, then I might lose myself. I’m single. So it’s not like I can date, because we google everyone we might date. So that’s been taken away from me too. How am I going to meet new people? What are they going to think of me?”
    She asked me who else was going to be in my book about people who had been publicly shamed.
    â€œWell, Jonah Lehrer so far,” I said.
    â€œHow’s he doing?” she asked me.
    â€œPretty badly, I think,” I said.
    â€œBadly in what way?” She looked concerned—I think more for what this might prophesy about her own future than about Jonah’s.
    â€œI think he’s broken,” I said.
    â€œWhen you say Jonah seems broken, what do you mean?” Justine said.
    â€œI think he’s broken and that people mistake it for shamelessness,” I said.
    People really were very keen to imagine Jonah as shameless, as lacking in that quality, like he was something not quite human that had adopted human form. I suppose it’s no surprise that we feel the need to dehumanize the people we hurt—before, during, or after the hurting occurs. But it always comes as a surprise. In psychology it’s known as cognitive dissonance. It’s the idea that it feels stressful and painful for us to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time (like the idea that we’re kind people and the idea that we’ve just destroyed someone). And so to ease the pain we create illusory ways to justify our contradictory behavior. It’s like when I used to smoke and I’d hope the tobacconist would hand me the pack that read SMOKING CAUSES AGING OF THE SKIN instead of the pack that read SMOKING KILLS —because aging of the skin? I didn’t mind
that
.
    â€”
    Justine and I agreed to meet again, but not for months, she told me. We’d meet again in five months. She was compelled to make sure that this was not her narrative. “I can’t just sit at home and watch movies every day and cry and feel sorry for myself,” she said. I think Justine wasn’t thrilled to be included in the same book as Jonah. She didn’t see herself as being anything like Jonah. Jonah lied repeatedly, again and again. How could Jonah bounce back when he’d sacrificed his character and lied to millions? Justine had to believe that there was a stark difference between that and her making a tasteless joke. She did something stupid, but she didn’t trash her integrity.
    She couldn’t bear the thought of being preserved within the pages of my book as a sad case. She needed to avoid falling into depression and self-loathing. She knew that the next five months were going to be crucial for her. She was determined to show the people who had smashed her up that she could rise again.
    How could she tell her story, she thought, when it was just beginning?
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    T he day after my lunch with Justine, I caught the train to Washington, D.C., to meet someone I had prejudged as a frightening man—a fearsome American narcissist—Ted Poe. For the twenty or so years he was a judge in Houston, Poe’s nationally famous trademark was to publicly shame defendants in the showiest ways he could dream up, “using citizens as virtual props in his personal theater of the absurd,” as the legal writer Jonathan Turley once put it.
    Given society’s intensifying eagerness to publicly shame people, I wanted to meet someone who had been doing it professionally for decades. What would today’s citizen shamers think of Ted Poe—his personality and his motivations—now that they were basically becoming him? What impact had his shaming frenzy had on the world around him—on the wrongdoers and the bystanders and